Django Best Practices: Custom User Model

• According to Django’s official documentation, it is preferred to use a custom user model, for more flexibility.

• a general rule, always use a custom user model for all new Django projects.

Setup

creating a new Django project

create and navigate into a dedicated directory called accounts for our code install Django make a new Django project called config make a new app accounts start the local web serve

AbstractUser vs AbstractBaseUser

In both cases we can subclass them to extend existing functionality however AbstractBaseUser requires much, much more work.

Custom User Model

update config/settings.py create a new CustomUser model create new UserCreation and UserChangeForm update the admin

Superuser

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

Templates/Views/URLs

Our goal is a homepage with links to log in, log out, and sign up. Start by updating settings.py to use a project-level templates directory. Then set the redirect links for log in and log out, which will both go to our home template. Add these two lines at the bottom of the file. Create a new project-level templates folder and within it a registration folder as that’s where Django will look for the log in template. We will also put our signup.html template in there. Then create four templates: urls views